Posted on 01/05/2005 6:15:42 PM PST by Leo Carpathian
Ukraine minister's death could have been murder disguised as suicide
Whether the death of Ukrainian Transport Minister Heorhiy Kyrpa on 27 December was suicide or murder disguised as suicide is less important than the reasons behind it, according to an article by Oleksandra Prymachenko in the Ukrainian weekly Zerkalo Nedeli. Just like the banker Yuriy Lyakh, who was found dead in suspicious circumstances last month, Kyrpa knew a lot about the criminal activities in which many leaders of the outgoing administration reportedly engaged. This made him a liability to outgoing President Leonid Kuchma and his other close associates and a potential key witness in any prosecutions to be initiated by the new president's team.
Prymachenko said that there were plenty of dubious activities in Kyrpa's own career, including his involvement in vote-rigging schemes in the first and second rounds of the recent presidential election. The article mentioned a number of business projects in which Kyrpa was involved, and named companies that supposedly belonged to him or his family. The outgoing Ukrainian authorities could never have imagined that Viktor Yushchenko would win the election, and they are now completely unprepared for the nemesis ahead. This could explain Kyrpa's death, the journalist suggested.
The following is the text of the article, published on 30 December 2004 under the title "A contract suicide"; subheadings are as published:
A criminal case in connection with the death of Transport Minister Heorhiy Kyrpa has been opened in keeping with Article 120 of the Criminal Code, which provides for liability for driving a person to suicide. The preciseness of the description attracted attention immediately given the preferred practice of the law-enforcement agencies opening a file on some occurrence rather than against someone, even if the guilty party is known to the overwhelming majority of the public. In other words, they usually do their utmost to avoid being at all specific. But in this case, even though the deceased left no note explaining his reasons, there is this unshakable certainty. As far as it is known, it rests on the fact that traces of powder were found on Kyrpa's hand. It has to be said that this is not the hardest trick for a professional killer to pull off. So, if that is the only argument behind the theory that he was driven to suicide, our investigative bodies are in a bad way. Not that that is anything new, though.
It remains to be hoped that the prosecutor's office has solid reasons for backing the suicide theory. There are alternatives. For example, according to information that, for obvious reasons, has not been checked, there are recordings of conversations that Kyrpa had with [Donetsk magnate and president of the Shakhtar Donetsk football club] Rinat Akhmetov and [MP, businessman and head of the Ukrainian Football Federation] Hryhoriy Surkis on the day preceding his death. If that is so, it may well be that the recorded information will assist the rapid conclusion of the investigation, which promises otherwise to be extremely difficult. Here, admittedly, there are several finer points that have to be mentioned, in all fairness. People in the know maintain that the most run-of-the-mill working conversation, as pursued by one of the gentlemen named above, may well sound to an outsider like a murder threat. In the present situation, that feature of his "figures of speech" may play a nasty trick on him - if, of course, these recordings actually exist and they were made for legitimate reasons, which is most unlikely. Otherwise the thorny path of the Melnychenko tapes [compromising tapes recorded in Kuchma's office by a former security officer] lies ahead of them.
Apart from that, it is evident that many of those who talked to Kyrpa on the day before he died certainly did not ring to wish him a happy new year. If recordings really were made of Kyrpa's conversations, we shall probably again all be listening to the voices that are so familiar to the whole country.
The news agencies reported that, not long before Kyrpa's death, he had a conversation with a "superior". Bearing in mind the minister's own rank, the "superior" could only have belonged to a very restricted circle of people - the president, the parliamentary speaker, the prime minister or the "relevant" deputy prime minister in charge of the fuel and energy sector and transport, i.e. Mr [Andriy] Klyuyev (who is also an MP and the power behind the throne at [Prime Minister] Viktor Yanukovych's election headquarters).
In view of the extremely contradictory nature of the information trickling from the prosecutor's office, one cannot be sure that Kyrpa settled his accounts with life with his own hand. If, though, we do not take as our starting point the postulates of Christian morality, which regards suicide as a mortal sin, forbids burial services for suicides and does not allow them to be buried on consecrated ground, yet writes off a great deal from the accounts of "slaughtered innocents", whoever they may have been in life, the essential point of whether it was suicide or not is unimportant in this particular case, paradoxical though it may sound. After all, whether Kyrpa was killed or forced to take his own life, whether it was a "heart-to-heart talk" or a straightforward bullet, both the causes and the "inspirers" are, in any case, identical.
NO WAY OUT
So, what might Kyrpa have really feared? To be perfectly honest, an incalculable number of factors might have given him sleepless nights. To start with the theory of the law-enforcement agencies, which are insisting on suicide, it amounts to [Kyrpa's] thoughts about [his] looming accountability to the so-called new authorities, which could not be staved off any longer. There was food for thought here, and not only in the context of his feverish activities in his recent posts - activities of which a considerable proportion have to be carefully scrutinized for corruption and abuse of power that led to serious consequences. Kyrpa was also perfectly well aware that his belated flirting with the orange revolution did not guarantee him any "amnesty" for his tireless, diametrically opposed activities over the previous months, which were also directly connected with the presidential election.
Kyrpa had reason to think that he would not see eye to eye with the new authorities. Specifically, that is what V. Stretovych of [Yushchenko's bloc] Our Ukraine, who heads the parliamentary Committee for Organized Crime and Corruption, seems to have been hinting at in an interview with Novyy Kanal.
Stretovych supposed that the reason for Kyrpa's death was the fact that there were in the former parliamentary majority people who had already made overtures to the new president because they aspired to the post of minister of transport and communications.
As far as is known, MP Oleksandr Yedin (of the United Ukraine party faction) has publicly stated his ambitions along these lines. It is ironical that Yedin and Kyrpa have a relationship with a very long and highly intriguing history. The successor would, undoubtedly, turn out to be perfectly worthy, at least in terms of his competence. As far as is known, he is up to speed regarding both Interkontrakt and the universally known Ekspres Bank, as well as the Interpolis insurance company, whose interests have been taken into account in every railway ticket sold, and Kyrpa's many other rip-offs.
Kyrpa, a minister surplus to the requirements of the new authorities, would have had to face dozens of searching questions. In particular, what was to be done about the state money that was actually spent on Yanukovych's election campaign and written off for that purpose, and about other such operations? Once out of the post that enabled him to be near the inexhaustible flow of finance, Kyrpa would seem to have had no answers.
At the same time, for the new authorities, Kyrpa was an extremely convenient target for the tone-setting fight against corruption in which they should, logically, become actively involved in the very near future. He was capable on his own of providing the law-enforcement agencies with a highly detailed and largely documented "breakdown" of the profitable activities of virtually all of the main players who are close to the outgoing administration and bound to it, quite sufficient not only for the instituting of criminal proceedings, but also for the passing of sentences.
WHOEVER DOESN'T BENEFIT?
It is obvious that the hardest theory to work on will be that of Kyrpa's death as resulting from an urge to "take him out", since, by the nature of his varied activities, the deceased was simply brimming over with information that was potentially dangerous to his health. It will not be easy to determine which particular piece of knowledge proved "incompatible with life". If, as is normal in such cases, we begin the search for an answer to the mystery of Kyrpa's death by asking the basic question "cui bono", the circle of suspects will be not only very extensive, but also quite well heeled.
Bearing all of the foregoing in mind, the statement by MP Nestor Shufrych [of presidential chief of staff Viktor Medvedchuk's United Social Democratic Party of Ukraine], who called angrily for all insinuations about the possibility of accusing anyone in Yanukovych's team of causing Kyrpa's death (which amounted to "Yanukovych and Kyrpa are both in the same team") to be dropped, does not sound at all like a convincing alibi. In this case, suspicion may fall first of all on the "people in the team" - particularly those whose hopes the deceased failed to justify. Heorhiy Kyrpa was Leonid Kuchma's man, and he was called "the servant of one man". Kuchma would give Kyrpa a helping hand during one of life's difficult moments, and he was seen as a likely successor to the president. Kyrpa could have revealed no fewer intriguing facts about the still incumbent president than the "prisoner of conscience", Pavlo Lazarenko [prime minister 1996-97, now in the USA], could. Through the nature of his activities, Kyrpa also possessed a considerable amount of specific information about Surkis-Medvedchuk, about the president's son-in-law, [Viktor] Pinchuk, and Rinat Akhmetov (particularly regarding the activities of the major transport bodies of [Pinchuk's] Interpipe [Group] and [Akhmetov's company] SCM [System Capital Management]) and, naturally, about [former prime minister and presidential candidate] Viktor Yanukovych. In addition, not long before the [presidential] election, Kyrpa was put in charge of the State Committee for Communications and Information Technology.
As far as is known, the investigation into the unsanctioned access to the CEC [Central Electoral Commission] server has pointed the finger at people answerable to Kyrpa (as minister of transport and communications). While talking about what else Kyrpa may have feared, we ought to specify a further, very curious aspect, although it is one that it is very hard for a journalist to prove. It may well be that the law-enforcement agencies will not follow up this aspect, deliberately regarding it as a malicious fabrication by spiteful people, not least because money is usually hard to come by in our country for trips abroad to conduct inquiries.
Mudslingers claim that Mr Kyrpa had very good "connections" in Italy and that there were firms there that did not, of course, have any documented link with Kyrpa, but which efficiently transferred money to Deutsche Bank. This is the bank that used to provide generous credit, under state guarantees from the Ukrainian government, for construction projects in which Kyrpa was engaged. Some information suggests that a certain Haim Bashich (Bashich Group), an Israeli citizen, used to assist Kyrpa. If we assume that his assistance consisted of signing documents that Kyrpa could not, for obvious reasons, sign himself, this could also be of interest to the inquiry - especially regarding whether Kyrpa took credit from himself. Incidentally, as far as is known, foreign embassies have not, over the past few months, been as generous as usual in granting visas to persons belonging to the highest echelons of power in our state and to members of their families. It is rumoured that the omnipotent Kyrpa tried unsuccessfully for a month to obtain a Schengen visa. He managed it in the end, the visa being issued by the Italian embassy.
In fact, virtually every stage in Kyrpa's career ought to have been duly recorded by the competent bodies in criminal or, at least, operational files. There were features of the expenditure of money during the building of the Kiev-Odessa highway; the tight control over the freight-forwarding market; the manipulation of transport rates and the existence of the "Donetsk economic miracle" - the transport company Lemtrans, which, together with Ukrmetalurhtrans [Ukrainian Metals Transportation company], is said to enjoy a 50-per-cent discount on the rates. Then there is the construction of the bridge over the Dnieper river [in Kiev]; aspects of the erection of the new Transport Ministry building regarding the use of manpower and the huge sums spent on decorating it; and the "progressive methods" for using special trains, whereby transport orders were, for some reason, handled through Department No 1, the so-called mobilization department, which is permissible in wartime or emergencies, but presidential elections do not, in theory, count as such [Kyrpa is said to have arranged special trains to carry multiple voters around the country through state rail operator Ukrzaliznytsya].
Information to the effect that about 70 per cent of the freight passing through Ukraine was carried by firms having a direct connection with Kyrpa should also be studied to see whether this is true. How do firms that, according to some information, actually belong to members of his family connected with the insurance of passengers, staff and pensioners, medical provision and banking? What is the real history of the Transforwarding Limited AG closed joint-stock company, the Fiakr company, the InterTransPolis insurance company and the Real Estate AG limited liability company?
Can at least part of all this be offset by the just as financially flawed erection of a church in honour of his patron (not Kuchma, but St George the Victorious) and the generous "development" of the village where he was born? From the point of view of the Criminal Code, the answer is a definite no.
But there is another side. Kyrpa's negative activities, which had nothing in common with the law, were on a large scale. However, this extremely energetic man left behind quite a few fond recollections about him. The numerous results of his work will forever remain a solid and visible monument to him. A vast number of people who worked under him have retained the fondest memories of him. Many will never forget his charitable activities and other good deeds. Above all, perhaps, his family are well aware of that today.
The organizers of Yanukovych's election campaign, led by Viktor Medvedchuk, totally rejected any outcome of the elections other than their candidate's victory. Consequently, nobody was particularly worried about how reputable the ways and means were. It simply did not occur to them that things might turn out differently, and, as a result, the high and mighty are absolutely unprepared for any review of their activities by the new authorities. To some extent, Kyrpa fell victim to precisely that fact. Over the past few days, a vast quantity of documents has migrated from the Transport Ministry (among others) to the headquarters of Our Ukraine. This does not, of course, mean that the new authorities will have sufficient resources to expose everything and everyone. It is quite important to ensure that Kyrpa's death is the last to be linked directly with the old authorities' fear of the new ones, since there are many people who, by virtue of their posts and posts, were at the interface of others' secrets - like the banker [Yuriy] Lyakh, who died recently [on 3 December] in equally strange circumstances [he died from paper-knife wounds to his throat]. The most important thing today is to stop this unnatural phenomenon that threatens to develop into a psychosis, as is shown by the most improbable rumours that have been spreading in recent days about the deaths of other people who were privy to the secrets of the great and good.
Very many people have been at the epicentre of dubious operations. The main thing is that nobody today should forget that life is more precious than liability.
Siberian flu is not strong enough!
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